Itamar Ben Ami is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He is interested in political theology, broadly construed: the tense encounter between theology and politics in late modernity; ontological disputes between religious and secular forms of life; and a critical genealogy of the foundations of modernity through the lens of religious traditions.

Itamar's work on Jewish Orthodoxy and its relations to broader discourses around theology and secularism in the 20th century either has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Modern Intellectual History, Harvard Theological Review, The Journal of Religion, the Jewish Quarterly Review, and Jewish Social Studies. Itamar is currently working on two book projects, one on the emergence of Ultra-Orthodox political theology and another on Jewish visibility and belonging in modernity.

Beginning in 2026, Itamar will be supported by a three-year Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for the project “Kippah Controversies: Jewish In/Visibility in Plural Settings.”

Itamar holds a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2022). Before arriving at Utrecht, he was a research fellow and lecturer at Humboldt University's Faculty of Theology (2020-2023) and Ruth Meltzer fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2022-2023). Itamar is a graduate of the Ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva educational system.